CATHOLIC HEALTH PARTNERS
Humility of Mary Health Partners of Youngstown, Ohio, is embarked on a $203 million renovation project that administrators say will better align the services offered at the system's three northeast Ohio campuses with the needs of communities in that region.
The project will enable the system to increase the number of private rooms at the three hospitals: St. Elizabeth Health Center of Youngstown, St. Elizabeth Boardman Health Center of Boardman and St. Joseph Health Center of Warren. It will add beds where the population is growing — in and around the Boardman area — and reduce bed count in the Youngstown area, where the population is decreasing, according to Paul Olivier, Humility of Mary's senior vice president of business development.
Plans call for the Boardman campus to grow to 250 beds from 134; and for the Youngstown campus to shrink to 212 beds from 308. Target bed counts for the Warren campus have yet to be determined.
The centerpiece of Humility of Mary's renovation project is the addition of six stories atop an existing single-story surgical and imaging building at the Boardman campus.
Humility of Mary plans to move maternity services currently at the Youngstown campus to the Boardman campus in the spring of 2014, when it opens floors two and three of the tower. The system also plans to move a neonatal intensive care unit operated through a partnership with Akron Children's Hospital from the Youngstown campus to the Boardman campus at that time.
Humility of Mary has been planning future expansion of the St. Elizabeth Boardman campus since that facility's inception, but administrators were waiting to see how much capacity the facility would need over time, based on population growth and demand for services. According to a Humility of Mary spokesperson, the demand grew sooner than anticipated.
Olivier noted that since that hospital opened five years ago, it has been operating at or near capacity. Expansion will continue at the Boardman campus during its second phase of construction, as it opens one new patient floor of the tower per year for four years beginning around January 2015.
At the Youngstown campus, Humility of Mary will renovate the emergency department, psychiatric unit and preoperative areas; and it will establish a hybrid operating room with heart catheterization and other surgical capacities. At the Warren campus, Humility of Mary is expanding the radiation therapy unit and adding a linear accelerator. It already has opened a digital radiology room. The Warren hospital has a free-standing emergency center in Andover, Ohio. As part of the renovation project, that facility will move across the street to expand and increase its capabilities.
Humility of Mary also plans to establish centers of excellence by bolstering cardiovascular, primary care, oncology, neurosciences, orthopedics and women's services throughout the system.
Copyright © 2012 by the Catholic Health Association of the United States
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